It's a smart phone and ipod and web browser and video media device. Hence, and especially considering the web/video aspects, having a larger screen is probably a good thing, no?
It's roughly the same size as a 30GB 5.5g iPod. Huge? Larger than your pocket? Huh?
One should also consider that it merges both your phone and your video ipod into a single device. As such, eliminating a device and its size and weight from the equation.
"It's failing because despite all the hype, the iPhone offers practically nothing that competing devices hasn't had for years..."
I could rephrase that to "It's failing because despite all the hype, the iPod offers practically nothing that competing devices haven't [sic] had for years." And look where that got them.
"...except the "Apple feel"..."
Which is the point you've missed entirely. Yes, many phones may have done some or all of those things before. Doesn't matter. The iPhone, like the iPod and the Mac, is about integration, and about doing those things consistently, seamlessly, and WELL. It's about elegance, and as such about NOT cramming in the kitchen sink, just because you can. Some people get that. Others don't.
You'd also do well to remember that it's merely the first iPhone. Future versions may have some or all of those features you deem to be necessary for success.. Then again, future versions may have FEWER features (e.g. nano).
"It's not about how it looks, it's about conveying information."
Then you're not a designer, graphic OR web. "Conveying information" is more than just piling a bunch of content onto a page, pushing it down the pipe, and hoping for the best. Design itself conveys information and sets the mood and tone and style of your site.
And yes, the screen reader will ignore the design... but that's okay. As near as I can tell, SR's account for about 0.01% of the browsers on the web, I can can afford to design for the majority as long as SR's are supported too. Content font preferences can be set--and remembered--via widgets.
Web pages are an interaction between the publisher and the user. And some of those users actually appreciate good design, much in the way that some users appreciate the differences between a PC and a Mac, or a Ford and a BMW.
And some don't (How's that Dell you're typing on?). But hey, horses for courses. The web's a big place. The publisher makes choices. If the users don't like those choices, they're free to go elsewhere. Some do. According to our logs, however, most don't.
Pages are not always supposed to look different for everyone. That puts a "rule" in place which you're assuming holds true for everyone under all circumstances. (It also tends to tell me which side of the debate you'd been on had you been part of the standards committee.)
Content is content. Design is design. Together, the two can be greater than the sum of the parts.
Guess that assumes that every wrong answer is fatal. It isn't. For example, I may not know the name of the bone, but the darn thing is still broken and needs setting.
Or do what Hogan envisioned in "Voyage from Yesteryear" send out a robot ship with genetic information coded. Ship arrives, plops down the make-more-robots factory, who in turn build infrastructure and use coded genetic information to grow and raise humans and then.. hey presto! A human colony.
"Nevertheless, while the standard makes more sense as it is, I more often want to set the width including padding and border, like my GP."
So the standard makes sense, but most of the time you use it the other way? Okay.
The problem with the standard is that it breaks real-world conceptual models. If I have a wooden box that's a foot square on the outside, it's a foot square, and it takes up a square foot on the shelf. Add an inch of padding to the inside of the box, and what happens? Gee, it's still a foot square on the outside, and still takes up a square foot on the shelf.
With the standard, I add or change the amount of padding inside the box, and the box now magically grows or shrinks, which makes stacking and arranging boxes (something else we do in the real world) much more difficult.
Looking at in using the Safari 3 public beta and it appears to render just fine. And if you consider that their market is the typical business I-have-to-have-every-number-at-my-fingertips type, the design probably fits too.
How much was the first high-end iPod? $499, right? Now, today the most expensive fifth-generation model is down to $349, while the cheapest models are $79 (shuffle) and $149 (nano).
Translation: don't assume that there's only going to be one model and one price point forever.
Secondarily, Apple may, like they do with Mac, be happy to simply dominate the high-end market. One set of numbers I've seen indicates that while Apple may only have 2-3% of the worldwide market for personal computers, they have %6 of the total US market and 26% of the high-end market.
Look at "The box is 300px, AND then... let's see... let's give it a 1px border and 10px inside PADDING." and "...decide to change the PADDING or border width", and you'll see that I meant to write "subtract the padding", not margin.
Sorry for the confusion, but I think there were enough hints there that you could have read for comprehension. Bt if you can't do the substitution in your head:
"With flakey standards, I may WANT a 300px-wide box. But I have to then subtract the borders, then subtract the PADDING, then write 278px. Look at it, decide to change the PADDING or border width, and I have to do the math again. Dumb."
Or try logically giving something a width of 100% so it fills the page, add 20px of padding INSIDE the container, and see what happens in a "standards" compliant browser. Whoops! We're now wider than the page! Dumb.
Padding is INISDE the container. As such, it should be INSIDE the 300px width, and not added on to it. Sorry, but they missed the boat on that one. Same with float clearing.
And as far as that goes, having absolute positioning automatically take its container out of the document flow and encompassing containers is stupid too. How many layouts with footers would have been a snap to do had it not been for that foul-up?
The standards "bodies" are just that. Bodies. People. Who make dumb mistakes. Or who promote agendas of their own choosing. I can just see it now:
"Fred, you can't do it that way. It screws up layouts."
Tom sniffs, his nose raised in distain. "Sorry Tom, but people shouldn't be using CSS for layouts anyway. The page should be pure."
"If I'm in a Heavy traffic area, i don't talk on the phone, I need all my attention on the road. But if I'm driving back home 6 miles from getting groceries, where I will see maybe 4 cars, total, after i get out of the city limits?"
Nice if-then. I'm sure the kid on a bike or the driver of a car that pops out of a hidden drive or side road is going to appreciate knowing that they were in a "safe" area.
"... kind of think I can be trusted to NOT do something suicidally stupid?"
Suicidally stupid, perhaps. Homicidally stupid, however, is quite another matter.
"... In 10 years, we have a thoroughly broken "box model" just because Microsoft uses a broken model today..."
If that's redefined as the standard then it's not broken, is it?
Besides, MS's model makes more sense anyway. If, as a designer, I want a 300px-wide box, why can't I say so? The box is 300px, AND then... let's see... let's give it a 1px border and 10px inside padding. One 300px-wide column, done.
With flakey standards, I may WANT a 300px-wide box. But I have to then subtract the borders, then subtract the margins, then write 278px. Look at it, decide to change the padding or border width, and I have to do the math again. Dumb.
I thought that's why we had computers in the first place.
If those pixel wells are two stops more "sensitive", then in bright light and at a given f-stop/shutter speed they're going to fill faster, eventually saturating and "blowing out" before the filtered pixels would. Think of a microphone sensitive enough to detect whispers, and then what happens when someone slams the door. Bang. Sound levels peg the needle.
It's inescapable. The clear pixels are either more sensitive to low-light levels, or they're not. If they're sensitive to low-light levels, then bright light is going to saturate them sooner. If they're saturated, they're blown, and they're not providing edge-detecting resolution information. QED, it's a tradeoff.
"For most photography applications, it is a meaningful advance for which there is no downside."
Well, you lose color resolution and I'd say that there's a good chance that in bright sunlight you're going to be blowing out quite a few of the clear pixels, losing luminance information there as well. Being "more" sensitive helps when there's less light, not when there's too much.
Since the final result wants to be RGB it's easier to start out that way. Second, you WANT light to be blocked by the peak filters in order to differentiate color.
A good sensor wants resolution AND sensitivity AND accuracy. Since you can't have all three at the same time, you make tradeoffs. Your solution might increase sensitivity, but at the cost of accuracy and resolution.
Just for future reference, Palm and Window's mobile both have SDKs. Please tell me what "killer-app's" exist on those platforms such that everyone is rushing out to buy one?...waiting......waiting...
On the flip side, go up to Handango and check out the "applications" for a PDA. Top sellers including a replacement for the shell, a program to make the close button "work", a file explorer, a backup program, a ringtone manager, several clocks, a weather widger, note and to-do list managers, yada, yada...
In other words, things that any decent system should have been able to do out of the box, and nary a one a "stunning" advance. And, near as I can tell, the iPhone already all of these things out of the box. And, from what I've seen, does most of them extremely well.
I agree that the iPhone has immense potential. But I also think that forecasting doom-and-gloom before the first one has even been sold is as equally shortsighted as you're making Apple out to be.
If I had the time, I know I'd be looking hard at what could be done NOW with an always-on always-connected phone/internet device and making that a "killer-app", instead of wasting time crying over the tools I could have had...
I think you need to browse the widget gallery at Apple. While there may well be some things you can't do, I think you'll see that there are many, many, many things you CAN do as well. Note that widgets are fundamentally just some HTML and CSS, some JavaScript and images, much the same as the proposed iPhone "applications".
And to elablorate on another point, I know that "I" don't know what scripting interfaces and hooks will be available (as was mentioned in the keynote). If you know, then please enlighten the rest of us. If, as I suspect, you don't, then I'm afraid that all of your pronouncements of doom are nothing more than random speculation and uninformed venting, and deserve to be treated as such.
You mean Tony never saw it coming. Every time the restaurant door opened the bell tinkles and the scene switched to his POV. He watches some people come in, Carmela come in, AJ come in. Then Meadow approaches the restaurant, we hear the bell... whack.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a smart phone and ipod and web browser and video media device. Hence, and especially considering the web/video aspects, having a larger screen is probably a good thing, no?
It's roughly the same size as a 30GB 5.5g iPod. Huge? Larger than your pocket? Huh?
One should also consider that it merges both your phone and your video ipod into a single device. As such, eliminating a device and its size and weight from the equation.
"It's failing because despite all the hype, the iPhone offers practically nothing that competing devices hasn't had for years..."
I could rephrase that to "It's failing because despite all the hype, the iPod offers practically nothing that competing devices haven't [sic] had for years." And look where that got them.
"...except the "Apple feel"..."
Which is the point you've missed entirely. Yes, many phones may have done some or all of those things before. Doesn't matter. The iPhone, like the iPod and the Mac, is about integration, and about doing those things consistently, seamlessly, and WELL. It's about elegance, and as such about NOT cramming in the kitchen sink, just because you can. Some people get that. Others don't.
You'd also do well to remember that it's merely the first iPhone. Future versions may have some or all of those features you deem to be necessary for success.. Then again, future versions may have FEWER features (e.g. nano).
"It's not about how it looks, it's about conveying information."
Then you're not a designer, graphic OR web. "Conveying information" is more than just piling a bunch of content onto a page, pushing it down the pipe, and hoping for the best. Design itself conveys information and sets the mood and tone and style of your site.
And yes, the screen reader will ignore the design... but that's okay. As near as I can tell, SR's account for about 0.01% of the browsers on the web, I can can afford to design for the majority as long as SR's are supported too. Content font preferences can be set--and remembered--via widgets.
Web pages are an interaction between the publisher and the user. And some of those users actually appreciate good design, much in the way that some users appreciate the differences between a PC and a Mac, or a Ford and a BMW.
And some don't (How's that Dell you're typing on?). But hey, horses for courses. The web's a big place. The publisher makes choices. If the users don't like those choices, they're free to go elsewhere. Some do. According to our logs, however, most don't.
Pages are not always supposed to look different for everyone. That puts a "rule" in place which you're assuming holds true for everyone under all circumstances. (It also tends to tell me which side of the debate you'd been on had you been part of the standards committee.)
Content is content. Design is design. Together, the two can be greater than the sum of the parts.
Guess that assumes that every wrong answer is fatal. It isn't. For example, I may not know the name of the bone, but the darn thing is still broken and needs setting.
"I've never understood the PC world's obsession with market share either."
Well, when that's all you have to talk about... (grin)
Or do what Hogan envisioned in "Voyage from Yesteryear" send out a robot ship with genetic information coded. Ship arrives, plops down the make-more-robots factory, who in turn build infrastructure and use coded genetic information to grow and raise humans and then.. hey presto! A human colony.
"Nevertheless, while the standard makes more sense as it is, I more often want to set the width including padding and border, like my GP."
So the standard makes sense, but most of the time you use it the other way? Okay.
The problem with the standard is that it breaks real-world conceptual models. If I have a wooden box that's a foot square on the outside, it's a foot square, and it takes up a square foot on the shelf. Add an inch of padding to the inside of the box, and what happens? Gee, it's still a foot square on the outside, and still takes up a square foot on the shelf.
With the standard, I add or change the amount of padding inside the box, and the box now magically grows or shrinks, which makes stacking and arranging boxes (something else we do in the real world) much more difficult.
Looking at in using the Safari 3 public beta and it appears to render just fine. And if you consider that their market is the typical business I-have-to-have-every-number-at-my-fingertips type, the design probably fits too.
How much was the first high-end iPod? $499, right? Now, today the most expensive fifth-generation model is down to $349, while the cheapest models are $79 (shuffle) and $149 (nano).
Translation: don't assume that there's only going to be one model and one price point forever.
Secondarily, Apple may, like they do with Mac, be happy to simply dominate the high-end market. One set of numbers I've seen indicates that while Apple may only have 2-3% of the worldwide market for personal computers, they have %6 of the total US market and 26% of the high-end market.
Translation: define "dominate".
"It may have some layout differences, but it will work."
If it doesn't look the way it was designed to look, then it doesn't "work".
Look at "The box is 300px, AND then... let's see... let's give it a 1px border and 10px inside PADDING." and "...decide to change the PADDING or border width", and you'll see that I meant to write "subtract the padding", not margin.
Sorry for the confusion, but I think there were enough hints there that you could have read for comprehension. Bt if you can't do the substitution in your head:
"With flakey standards, I may WANT a 300px-wide box. But I have to then subtract the borders, then subtract the PADDING, then write 278px. Look at it, decide to change the PADDING or border width, and I have to do the math again. Dumb."
Or try logically giving something a width of 100% so it fills the page, add 20px of padding INSIDE the container, and see what happens in a "standards" compliant browser. Whoops! We're now wider than the page! Dumb.
Padding is INISDE the container. As such, it should be INSIDE the 300px width, and not added on to it. Sorry, but they missed the boat on that one. Same with float clearing.
And as far as that goes, having absolute positioning automatically take its container out of the document flow and encompassing containers is stupid too. How many layouts with footers would have been a snap to do had it not been for that foul-up?
The standards "bodies" are just that. Bodies. People. Who make dumb mistakes. Or who promote agendas of their own choosing. I can just see it now:
"Fred, you can't do it that way. It screws up layouts."
Tom sniffs, his nose raised in distain. "Sorry Tom, but people shouldn't be using CSS for layouts anyway. The page should be pure."
"If I'm in a Heavy traffic area, i don't talk on the phone, I need all my attention on the road. But if I'm driving back home 6 miles from getting groceries, where I will see maybe 4 cars, total, after i get out of the city limits?"
Nice if-then. I'm sure the kid on a bike or the driver of a car that pops out of a hidden drive or side road is going to appreciate knowing that they were in a "safe" area.
"... kind of think I can be trusted to NOT do something suicidally stupid?"
Suicidally stupid, perhaps. Homicidally stupid, however, is quite another matter.
"... In 10 years, we have a thoroughly broken "box model" just because Microsoft uses a broken model today..."
If that's redefined as the standard then it's not broken, is it?
Besides, MS's model makes more sense anyway. If, as a designer, I want a 300px-wide box, why can't I say so? The box is 300px, AND then... let's see... let's give it a 1px border and 10px inside padding. One 300px-wide column, done.
With flakey standards, I may WANT a 300px-wide box. But I have to then subtract the borders, then subtract the margins, then write 278px. Look at it, decide to change the padding or border width, and I have to do the math again. Dumb.
I thought that's why we had computers in the first place.
In the same vein perhaps all of those FireFox download numbers are equally inflated. Try it out, go back to what you know.
If those pixel wells are two stops more "sensitive", then in bright light and at a given f-stop/shutter speed they're going to fill faster, eventually saturating and "blowing out" before the filtered pixels would. Think of a microphone sensitive enough to detect whispers, and then what happens when someone slams the door. Bang. Sound levels peg the needle.
It's inescapable. The clear pixels are either more sensitive to low-light levels, or they're not. If they're sensitive to low-light levels, then bright light is going to saturate them sooner. If they're saturated, they're blown, and they're not providing edge-detecting resolution information. QED, it's a tradeoff.
"For most photography applications, it is a meaningful advance for which there is no downside."
Well, you lose color resolution and I'd say that there's a good chance that in bright sunlight you're going to be blowing out quite a few of the clear pixels, losing luminance information there as well. Being "more" sensitive helps when there's less light, not when there's too much.
Translation: There's always a downside.
Since the final result wants to be RGB it's easier to start out that way. Second, you WANT light to be blocked by the peak filters in order to differentiate color.
A good sensor wants resolution AND sensitivity AND accuracy. Since you can't have all three at the same time, you make tradeoffs. Your solution might increase sensitivity, but at the cost of accuracy and resolution.
Oh please. 34.56.231.23 has made a request for seed 4e4564e443ed34a33.
You know that, or you could not fulfill the request. Now log it.
Yeah, they start with premise A, and... then... make... a... giant... leap... to... "obvious"... conclusion B.
Just for future reference, Palm and Window's mobile both have SDKs. Please tell me what "killer-app's" exist on those platforms such that everyone is rushing out to buy one? ...waiting... ...waiting...
Huh.
On the flip side, go up to Handango and check out the "applications" for a PDA. Top sellers including a replacement for the shell, a program to make the close button "work", a file explorer, a backup program, a ringtone manager, several clocks, a weather widger, note and to-do list managers, yada, yada...
In other words, things that any decent system should have been able to do out of the box, and nary a one a "stunning" advance. And, near as I can tell, the iPhone already all of these things out of the box. And, from what I've seen, does most of them extremely well.
I agree that the iPhone has immense potential. But I also think that forecasting doom-and-gloom before the first one has even been sold is as equally shortsighted as you're making Apple out to be.
If I had the time, I know I'd be looking hard at what could be done NOW with an always-on always-connected phone/internet device and making that a "killer-app", instead of wasting time crying over the tools I could have had...
I think you need to browse the widget gallery at Apple. While there may well be some things you can't do, I think you'll see that there are many, many, many things you CAN do as well. Note that widgets are fundamentally just some HTML and CSS, some JavaScript and images, much the same as the proposed iPhone "applications".
And to elablorate on another point, I know that "I" don't know what scripting interfaces and hooks will be available (as was mentioned in the keynote). If you know, then please enlighten the rest of us. If, as I suspect, you don't, then I'm afraid that all of your pronouncements of doom are nothing more than random speculation and uninformed venting, and deserve to be treated as such.
You mean Tony never saw it coming. Every time the restaurant door opened the bell tinkles and the scene switched to his POV. He watches some people come in, Carmela come in, AJ come in. Then Meadow approaches the restaurant, we hear the bell... whack.
Report the problem. It is a public beta, after all.